I remember / je me souviens

I remember / je me souviens

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For those limbic bursts of nostalgia, invented by Proust, miniaturized by Nicholson Baker, and freeze-dried by Joe Brainard in his I remember and by Georges Perec in his Je me souviens.

But there are no fractions, the world is an integer
Like us, and like us it can neither stand wholly apart nor disappear.
When one is young it seems like a very strange and safe place,
But now that I have changed it feels merely odd, cold
And full of interest.
--John Ashbery, "A Wave"

Sometimes I sense that to put real confidence in my memory I have to get to the end of all rememberings. That seems to say that I forego remembering. And now that strikes me as an accurate description of what it is to have confidence in one's memory.
--Stanley Cavell, The Claim of Reason

Friday, November 02, 2012

I remember the patterns of daylight in our house, one of those things that are not remembered until they are recognized. The intensities and shadows streaming through the balcony window in the living room and the front porch -- fresh and wide in the morning, curtain-blocked glare on weekend afternoons, comforting heavy orange after school, dim gray in the rain. My windows and porch now also face east, for the first time, and it's all the same light as then.

posted by sravana 5:27 PM
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